JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In the opening pages of a new novel, "Good Dirt," a young girl is playing with her older brother. They've decorated an old stoneware jar, adding a baseball cap, a handlebar mustache made out of paper. The jar ends up another character in a family photograph with the girl, the boy and their parents. The boy, we soon learn, is Baz, his sister is Ebby, and that old jar is a cornerstone of their family story which is told over generations. The book is "Good Dirt," and author Charmaine Wilkerson joins us now to discuss it. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
CHARMAINE WILKERSON: Thanks very much.
SUMMERS: Charmaine, I just want to start at the beginning, if we can, with the idea that inspired for you the story of Ebby and Baz and of this jar. I want to know, where did you start? What character came first for you?
WILKERSON: Well, the character that came first was Ebby. Ebby Freeman is Ebony Freeman. And she really just popped right into my head on the worst day of her life, and that's connected to the thought that sort of inspired this character. It really came from an emotional question in my mind and in my life.
SUMMERS: Tell us a bit more about Ebby. Who is she? What is she like?
WILKERSON: Ebby is an African American young woman who's grown up under privileged circumstances. She lives in this gorgeous community in Connecticut. She loves being from an old New England family. But Ebby has decided that she needs to run away from home at age 29. She goes to France temporarily because she's convinced that the only way to distance herself from painful memories from her past - a family tragedy and a very embarrassing and public romantic breakup - is to get away from everyone she knows and everything she knows.
SUMMERS: What is it that made you want to explore this idea of how a personal tragedy can shape a person's identity and really the course of their life?
WILKERSON: I began my professional life in television news, and so from a very young age, from age 21, I would find myself walking into a person's home on the worst day of their life and - I think that you can identify with this - meeting people under terrible circumstances and then going home later and wondering, how will they move forward? How will they do this? - especially when they've become news, when their personal pain is now in the public eye.
SUMMERS: This book takes two tracks. There is, of course, the story of Ebby and her family in the present day, and - but we also begin to learn the stories of previous generations of the family and the story of that old stoneware jar that we later learn to call Old Mo. And you hinted this in the opening pages of your book, that the jar is a character, that it's really a part of Ebby and Baz's family. Can you just tell us why it was so important?
WILKERSON: So you hit on the opening scene, in which they're - she and her brother, Ebby and Baz, are playing around with the jar. They're decorating it. They're dressing it up like a person because they're still children, but it is of great, serious importance because it is a jar that has come into their family by way of an enslaved ancestor. And the story of how that jar ends up being made in the American South and finds its way to Massachusetts and remains in that family for generations and becomes so important to the family is that sort of backstory of the Freeman family.
SUMMERS: I won't give away much of the plot, but I have to say one of the things I found most compelling when I was reading this book was how deeply you dove into the history of pottery making, stretching from the American South all the way to West Africa. What made you decide to dive into that so deeply, and how did you approach that part of your writing?
WILKERSON: For me, it was a process of discovery. I'm one of those writers who - I start from a point of emotion. You know, this character came to me, and I thought, I'm going to follow her. The very first thing I wrote about Ebby - there's a scene in which an antique jar falls from a table. And I started to look into the history of what that jar would be. Where would it come from? And really, so much of that story came from a learning process for me.
I learned about the mass production of stoneware by enslaved people, usually men, primarily in the part of the American South that we now call South Carolina, also Georgia, because they had very - they had special soil that allowed them to make this kind of clay. And the title of the book, "Good Dirt," is a reference, in part, to the idea of having good dirt that allows you to make very special clay. So much of the story was the result of my own exploration. Things that I did not know or might have heard of became the backstory for this young woman, Ebby Freeman.
SUMMERS: The central role that this jar plays in Ebby's family and her story made me think a lot about the impact of things that we inherit and the way that they impact our identities and our families and how we see ourselves. And I just wonder, is there an object like that jar that plays a specific role of significance in your own family?
WILKERSON: I come from a very different family from the fictional Ebby. So, you know, across two or three generations, my elders came from different countries and different cultures. But in my debut novel, "Black Cake," I invent a character who - for whom a very prized inheritance is a recipe, and that is something that I inherited from my own mother. She really did make what some people call black cake, what she called rum pudding. The recipe was important. The stories were important.
And really what the story "Good Dirt" is at the heart is not a story about a tangible inheritance, Old Mo, the stoneware jar. It's a story about the intangible because there is no tangible without the intangible. If we're talking about inheritance, of culture, it's really about the stories. The family feels great affection for a tangible object, this stoneware jar, but it's really about the emotion and the culture and the stories that have helped to shape the family.
SUMMERS: I want to end, if I can, on a personal note. This book is a multilayered, multigenerational telling of an American story. As you wrote it, what did you learn from it? What did you take away from it yourself?
WILKERSON: I would say that in writing this, I continued to deepen my thinking about the power of stories to shape our identities - the story that is handed down from one generation to another, the story that we tell others about ourselves and, in this particular case, the stamp that trauma can leave on one's identity. So what is the challenge facing Ebby Freeman? In a way, the challenge for her is to find a way to rewrite or reconfigure her relationship with an episode that was so traumatic in her life that it has dominated, it continues to dominate, her adult life. So she's, we hope, going to find a new way to write her story.
SUMMERS: Author Charmaine Wilkerson - her latest book is "Good Dirt." Charmaine, thank you so much for being here.
WILKERSON: Thanks so much for having me.
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